Single cell mRNA sequencing on esophageal cells after HH pathway activation

In this study we used single cell mRNA sequencing to explore heterogeneity of the fate induced by hedgehog (HH) pathway activation in esophageal cells. We merged the data from the two samples and filtered the merged data to work only with cells expressing the SmoM2-YFP protein (2,413 cells). Using UMAP reduction, we observed 10 clusters with a resolution set at 0.3. Among these clusters, we identified clusters of squamous esophagus epithelial cells but also one cluster enriched for many columnar markers. These results show that activation of the HH pathway in esophageal keratinocytes leads to multiple cell phenotypes including a columnar epithelial one in a minority of keratinocytes. Overall design: Oesophageal single cell mRNA profiles of Krt5SmoM2 mice by deep sequencing using 10x genomic and Illumina